This morning I at last made start on cutting some mortices. Whenever possible I cut mortices with a router as nothing else comes close for a clean result. To assist in this task I have invested in a Festool MFS adjustable router template for use in building this bench. It certainly saves a lot of faffing about making up a template from scrap and with all the different mortices to be cut in this bench build I reckon it will definitely earn its keep.
In this picture I am just setting it up and have made a test cut on a piece of wood left from preparing the material for the legs.
That worked OK so it’s on to the legs proper and here is the result of the first effort – a nice clean 52mm deep mortice.
I shall need to square up the corners but I expect that wont be too much of a job..
With all the mortises cut by the router having round corners, I needed to square them up (sometimes I round the tenons but not in this set where I wanted the closest possible fit). I used a Vertisa corner chisel to define the cut lines in the corners then chiselled them square with a mix of paring and pounding.
During this process, I noted that the side walls of all my mortices were not perfectly vertical, showing a tendency to inclination in the same direction and by the same amount in each. I put this down to my bit “walking” whilst routing these deep mortices, perhaps because I was taking too big a cut each time. In any event, a set of very light cuts with a spiral bit soon had them all straight and true so I proceeded to cut the tenons on the rails.
In the case of the short rails, I did these on the Woodrat but the weight and dimensions of even these smaller rails were pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone with the ‘Rat so I switched to cutting the shoulders on the tablesaw, the cheeks on the bandsaw and then trimmed them to fit with my Veritas hand router.
Fitting the rails to the mortices was quite a lengthy process as there was a fair bit of fine tuning needed with these big things and I resorted to the old trick of checking where a bit of pencil lead smeared in the joint then relieving that part.
A couple of the shoulders needed a bit of attention too so the big LN shoulder plane came into its own for this job.
Finally, the base came together and the dry fit looks good. Corner to corner measurements at the top of the legs are identical so I guess a few inaccuracies must have cancelled out! 
[
{ 0 comments }
